Co-Founder and President & Poets of the Round

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In April of 2023, I had the privilege to attend a masterclass by former Texas Poet Laureate Emmy Pérez. There, in a smallish classroom on the 3rd floor of the liberal arts building, I happened to run into my good friend and fellow TEP staff writer Damaris Martinez.

Pérez guided a discussion centered on staying true to the challenging core emotion of a poem by taking risks on the page. The goal was to stay centered, to write a fearless poem by writing toward the fear, toward the difficult emotion. She closed the session with a freewrite, encouraging all of the writers in attendance to “go for the jugular”, to say what needed to be said.

Damaris and I were so struck by her lecture and by the sense of artistic camaraderie in that little beige-walled, coffee-scented room, that we lamented the lack of a poetry-centered student group on campus. “There’s nothing like this here,” we said, “no one ever gets together to just enjoy poetry.”

Then the realization hit — it was our responsibility to make it happen. That masterclass was on the 3rd, and by the 12th, we had planned and hosted the first monthly poetry open mic of the campus group called Poets of the Round. We held weekly poetry workshops: low-stakes, informal meetings where we would discuss various poetic techniques, styles, and forms. The goal was accessibility, a place where even people who had never read poetry before could have fun and walk away having learned something new.

Damaris graduated soon after, leaving me in charge of running the group. I continued the weekly meetings for the next year, during which time the group became a gathering spot for some of the best poetic voices on campus: Daniel Warzecha and Felipe Medrado both attended meetings, and each went on to win First Place in Undergraduate Poetry in Texas A&M’s annual literary contest, The Gordone Awards. (Damaris and I each earned honorable mentions in the contest.)

The group eventually dissolved due to dwindling membership — I take responsibility for this, as I could have done more to advertise the meetings and bring in excited and curious people. But for the year that it ran, it was exactly the artistic community that Damaris and I had hoped to bring to life.

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